faith

This year, I spent Christmas in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex and in all honesty, it was hard. It was sweet that Alex and I finally got to spend our very first Christmas together and it was sweet to have quality time with his family and take part in different traditions. But for the first time in many years, I didn’t get to take a starlight walk through a field and imagine the chorus of angels behind the silence. I didn’t perch atop a hay bale under a barn roof and journal with half-numb fingers about the glorious implications of lesser-known Christmas carols. There are no fields here, of course, and certainly no hay bales. What’s more to the point, there is no space for solitude in nature, and I’m finding more and more that productive reflection and rest is really difficult for me to achieve indoors.

One thing I did do was spend two full afternoons in an upscale shopping mall, hiding out in a bookstore and looking for some soul peace. On Christmas Eve, I was there the whole afternoon, thumbing through poetry books, vaguely looking for something to anchor my anxious heart.

The triviality of the world can be stifling and I think we all feel it at different times and in different ways. I feel it most when I’m in the presence of hopeless materialism, when I’m watching people get bogged down and burdened by the tightening chains of things that are without longevity, purpose or meaning. And of course, there’s nowhere like the mall if you want to get yourself a load of that.

One of the books I explored that afternoon in the bookstore was Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems For Hard Times. In his introductory notes, Keillor explains why he thinks poetry has something to contribute to people who are suffering. “The meaning of poetry,” he says, “is to give courage.” And that stuck with me. Because ah. That is what I chiefly need.

Since I couldn’t find any poems that spoke to what I was feeling, I started scratching out a brand new one, pouring my sadness and frustration into lyrical words. But, as so often happens, hope happened at the end of it.

This poem is meant to push back on the dangerous idea that what we’re up against today is somehow worse or less conquerable than what has been in the past. For a traditional artist like me, whose heart beats faster at the sight of hard-copy letters and old-fashioned style and the texture of paper, who feels a sadness in the pit of my stomach when I see isolation creeping into culture or the price of postage going always up; well, this is vital.

It’s vital that Jesus came into a horrible, horrible, world where nothing made sense and everyone was confused. Where truth was murky and beauty was treacherous and self-preservation was central. These things have always been, taking one form or another. And that’s vital.

It’s vital for post-Christmas, when we’re trying to get ready for the new year, for the sorrows that are inevitable, for the loneliness of being human, for the days when faith doesn’t seem to fit anywhere.

The title of the poem refers to the ornithogalum flower, also known as the “Star of Bethlehem.” I took an interest in it earlier this month when I was working on the January edition of the Letters From the Sea Tower. I wanted to make a little illustration for a striking line from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. In his exploration of the mythos of King Arthur, Tennyson employs the phrase, “wearing the white flower of a blameless life,” and I chose the small, unobtrusive, starry ornithogalum to be my model for the white flower. But as I began to write this poem, it came to me that if a white flower is a representation of a blameless life, there is someone who wore it far better than even King Arthur. Here’s to Him.

And without further ado, here’s my little poem. May it bring you some courage to face the shallowness of the world with limitless grace and cheerful defiance. May your life in some kind resemble the humble, white-flower life of Jesus.

STAR OF BETHLEHEM [Ornithogalum]

The world was just this way
when
Baby Jesus bloomed in the
crisp winter and the frost
couldn’t wilt him.

People then as now
were lost in the unnavigable maze of the self
little guessing there was
around any corner
a turn into a passage fragrant
with fresh air
and the urgent invitations of the gulls.

People then as now
were shelling out their small, limitless lives
for those briefest of commodities:
pleasure and applause

when Christ came low and
behold
the white flower of paradise opening
gently in the carpet
of the grass.

The past couple of months have been pretty quiet here on the blog, and that’s mostly because I’ve been pouring all my time and energy and passion into launching an enormous new project that’s unlike anything I’ve ever undertaken before. I just began sharing it with the world this month and I’ve never been this excited about any of my other creative ventures, so I just have to make a little announcement about it here too!

So here it is: I’m going to be producing a handmade monthly subscription letter that celebrates art and literature and how it matters for the Great Battle of Our Time. I’ll fill these letters with watercolor paintings and sketches, field notes from nature or history or my travels, and illustrated poetry or quotes from my commonplace book. My dream for this project is to produce a letter that fills people with courage and creativity. And I want to make gorgeous, high-quality copies of them and personalize each one and mail them out all over the world.

I remember when I was a kid getting letters in the mail was always a festive occasion. I had a few friends who wrote me snail mail letters and I basically haunted the mailbox whenever I knew one was on the way. Sometimes I would bring the letter inside but wait a few hours to open it, just because I wanted the anticipation to last longer!

Fast-forward to today and most of my mail now is bills and bank statements and political ads and grocery store coupons for items I’m not ever going to buy. I think that might be true for most of us. And I don’t like that. So over the summer I’ve began toying with an idea for how to use to my gifts and talents and interests to revive beautiful, meaningful, and unique hard-copy mail.

Because I know: the world isn’t always a glad place. What’s around us is sometimes so dark. And I want to do some little thing to bring the wisdom and the beauty of the ages right down into mailboxes and homes in a tangible form: fresh artwork on paper you can hold and hang up on the fridge and carry around in your pocket. I want to revive beautiful, meaningful, and unique hard-copy mail. I want to give people courage, because goodness only knows we NEED it. I need it every day. So that’s why I decided to begin writing the Letters From the Sea Tower.

The inspiration for the name of this subscription comes from “The Monsters and the Critics,” an essay J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about literary criticism of Beowulf. In his essay, Tolkien tells a little allegorical story about a man who built a tower on his property. His friends and neighbors thought the tower was a waste of valuable material, but they didn’t know that the man had built it in order to be able to see the sea. My hope is that these letters will offer a similar vantage-point as the tower in that story, that in the middle of our often dreary and monotonous lives, they will be a reminder of glory and unseen reality and a fleeting glimpse of “joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

I don’t plan to make these letters a highlight reel or a carefully curated collection of the happy things happening in my life. Instead, I want them to be a well of stories and ideas that inspire others to take heart and remember their callings. And I want to draw out the glory from ordinary things so that others can be inspired to do the same in their own settings, no matter where they are.

Over the past two months, I’ve spent many hours getting this project ready to launch and producing the first letter. It’s printed right here in my own home on thick, 100% cotton paper and packaged in the most epic envelope, with ink stamps vintage postage stamps. So far, I’ve sent out fifty-four of these letters to giveaway winners, subscribers, and friends, and I have another twelve going out this week. In order to make the letters as accessible as possible, I’m offering subscriptions for three months, six months, or a year, and if you’re not sure if this subscription is for you, you can even purchase a one-month trial subscription for just $12 (which actually comes with two letters, since it includes the intro letter as well as the next monthly letter!) If this sounds like something you might want to be a part of, check out the subscription listing in my Etsy shop to learn more.

The project will officially begin in January 2019 when I mail out the second letter, which I’m currently creating. Afterwards, a new letter will be mailed out each month. That means this is the perfect time to subscribe if you want to be sure you don’t miss out on any of the letters! The subscription might also be a glorious and meaningful Christmas gift for friends who care about literature and the arts. Several people have already ordered gift subscriptions and I work with each one to create a unique, handwritten note explaining the subscription to the gift recipient.

Eventually, my hope is that each month I’ll be able to mail some of these letters out to people who aren’t subscribers at all and might not otherwise ever receive anything like this. The initial launch for a project like is quite costly and so I’ll need a stable subscriber base in order to be able to afford to expand the reach of the letters in this way. However, as I invite you to participate with me in the development of this project, I want to let you know my full vision for where I hope to take these Letters From the Sea Tower.

When I was twelve, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon in the legendary bookshops of the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye. For £5, I purchased an ancient copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poetry, published in 1883, nine years before his death.

What a world of wonder it opened up to me! It may have even changed my life.

On one of the front pages, spotted with yellow patches of age, I found an inscription identifying the book’s first owner: “To Lilian Henderson from the Parents of the Infant School of S. Mark’s South Teddington in token of their love and appreciation of her kindness to their children. Jan 31. 1884.” How this excited me! Well over a century before, this woman had held my book in her own hands and loved it when it was new and the golden gilt edges still shone. In my imagination, I created Lilian Henderson. She had dark hair and spoke with a soft voice and wore plain white dresses edged with lace.

Inside her book, I found little slips of verse and a penciled list of titles with their corresponding page numbers. Lilian, I was sure, had written these. I read them over and over, and I carefully worked through her list of what I assumed were recommended titles, prepared to like each one right from the start, reading them like a prospector hunting for gold.

The other slips of paper, those with the excerpts of poetry, planted themselves in my mind and, thirteen years later, I still think of them sometimes. One piece had two neat little maxims penned with great care. I was fascinated by the appearance of the writing. The effect of the inked dip pen on the page was startling and glorious to me, and looking back now, I think my first love for old-fashioned ink lettering was kindled in me that very day.

On the back of this sheet, Lilian (so I like to think) had written out a quatrain from “Lady Clara Vere de Vere.” I didn’t have ready internet access at the time, so I didn’t know the origin of the verse until I discovered it myself in the poem. What fun that was! What a thrill of discovery! The text reads:

Howe’er it be, it seems to me, ’Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.

At the time, I had yet no notion of the tempting lures of classism and snobbery that would come to afflict me later. But I hid these lines away in my heart and they came back to me just this week to shed light and wisdom on a present struggle.

And this, after all, is why I do what I do. It’s why I love to create art out of words that have the power of truth behind them. Because when these words are duly ingested and have truly saturated our hearts, I do believe they are weapons in the good fight of everyday life. It’s as Charlotte Mason wrote in Towards A Philosophy of Education:“I heard the other day of a man whose whole life had been elevated by a single inspiring (poetic) sentence which he heard as a schoolboy.”

That’s real. The text can take us higher. I believe it because it happens to me.

For the rest of my stay in Great Britain, I devoured Tennyson voraciously from this historic volume. I had always enjoyed reading, and had read some of Tennyson already, but the experience of stumbling through pages of blank verse that I knew to be intended for adults was a new kind of challenge. It made me feel grown up and I was eager to rise to the occasion and demonstrate that I could enjoy this book as it was meant to be enjoyed and as thousands of other Victorian Britons (including Lilian) had, I presumed, enjoyed it.

I read the easy ones, like “The Lady of Shallot,” “The Brook,” “Alymer’s Field,” “Marianna in the South,” “Break break break,” and Lady Clare,” (not the same as Lady Clara Vere de Vere. I know, so confusing.) I tried to read “The Princess,” although I understood it not a whit. I even struggled through pages and pages of “In Memoriam.” On the plane back to the Middle East, where my family was living at the time, I tried to hide my tears over “Rizpah” and “In The Children’s Hospital.” And in a cold drizzle in the Welsh countryside, sheltering the book with my jacket, I read a poem that would affect me so much I would write about the experience later in my own first poetry collection.

To contemporary readers, “Enoch Arden” might seem to be trying too hard. The story of a sailor who is lost at sea and returns home after many years to find that his devoted wife has finally given him up for dead and remarried his childhood rival may not sound to us like a fresh plot or a new idea. But reading the story at twelve, still inexperienced both in life and in fiction, I was captivated by the pathos and tragedy of the characters. I was desperate for a resolution, for a happy ending, and genuinely disappointed when I realized that the loss in the story was going to be permanent, that there was not going to be any way out. However, I was able to grasp some little part of what Enoch’s character champions at the end of the story when he chooses not to reveal himself to his wife and her new husband but dies alone, blessing them with his last words and taking comfort that he will soon join their child whose death in infancy had been a great blow.

It doesn’t sound original, perhaps, but this woeful story in blank verse moved my heart so deeply and stirred me to value and adore silent, self-denying heroism, an attribute all too easily forgotten in this era of fanfare and self-promotion. “Enoch Arden” talked to me and it made me better. It talked to me because I had no smartphone to fill up my spare minutes, no little red notifications to distract me from the book in my hands and the great outdoors around me. Because of that, I made connections with words that would stick with me always, and with a woman who lived over a hundred years ago and was kind to the children of the Infant School at St. Mark’s, South Teddington.

I have yet to mention the Tennyson poem that has been with me the longest. Even before I bought Lilian Henderson’s book in the little Welsh shop, I had memorized one of Tennyson’s most famous pieces in school and copied it out in my best hand-writing on lined paper. I had been given the option to pick a poem to memorize, and the one I chose was “Crossing The Bar.” Yes, I chose it in part because it was shorter than many of the other options. (Although, to be fair, it’s certainly longer than “Flower In The Crannied Wall.” So there’s that.) But also, it held a strange fascination for me. I had only a vague idea of what was being conveyed, and was certainly thrown off by phrases like, “from out our bourne of Time and Place,” and “such a tide as moving seems asleep,” but I just disregarded these odd lines and stuck to what I understood.

I knew that in this poem, Tennyson compares death to a sandbar that separates a ship from the ocean, and hints at his hope of encountering God (the “Pilot”) on the other side of death. This seemed sublime to me, and while I wanted Tennyson to take a bit of a lighter tone and be a little bit more reassuring and less darkly mysterious, I was, on the whole, well satisfied with my choice. Lilian too, it seems, was a fan. “Crossing The Bar” was only poem she wrote out in its entirety and stowed away between the pages of her copy of Tennyson.

It has been something like seventeen years since then. I now know why Tennyson said, “Twilight and evening bell, / And after that the dark!” I know why he said he “hoped,” to see the Pilot, not that he “would” see Him. Like most of the great thinkers and writers in the Victorian age, Tennyson grappled with faith all throughout his life and at times seems to have been overwhelmed by doubt. But the words he wrote in honor of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam in “In Memoriam,” are perhaps equally applicable to their author:

Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds, At last he beat his music out. There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

Later in his life, Tennyson wrote, “The Pilot has been on board all the while, but in the dark I have not seen him…[He is] that Divine and Unseen Who is always guiding us.” Before his death, he told his son Hallam that he wanted “Crossing The Bar” to appear at the end of all future editions of his poetry.

At last he beat his music out.

A few weeks ago, I set out to create a piece of art that would honor the debt I owe to Tennyson. My artistic rendition of “Crossing The Bar” is a small watercolor painting accompanied by hand-lettered dip pen calligraphy – the kind Lilian Henderson got me sold on back in the day. Thanks, Lilian, whoever you were. It took me several days to complete this piece and although my capitals are still improving, I’m pleased with how it came out. 8×10 prints just became available in my Etsy shop yesterday, so if you want to have one for your own home, click here to view the listing.

[NOTE: I’ve tried to find records of Lilian Henderson, but haven’t been successful so far. If anyone out there knows anything about her, her family, life, or connections, I’d love to hear from you!]

[This week I’ve been covered up with custom calligraphy orders, including one extensive project where I get to do traditional calligraphy and illuminated letters, which makes me excited every time I think about it! I’ll post some pictures a little further on in the process. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a fairly recent poem. This one was awarded the first-place prize in the 2018 Utmost Christian Writers Contest back in April and was first published as part of that contest.]

FURNACE BACKSTORY

Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold.He set it up on the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon.
Tenderly the king took the bread from the mouths of the children,
tended to his own likeness like a hen broods over
the chicks under her heartbeat.

The king was consumed with his significant self;
he dwelt at the mirror and spun his sonnets there,
and into his circle of devotion he took the whole world.
All the world is pouring out into Dura
like threads of ants to a crisped cricket on the black leaves.

Isn’t a crowd like a large beast looking for something to kneel to?
Their eyes are hungry for divinity, their ears are cups
to catch the fifes, the tubas, and the big kettledrum.
Point but a finger and you fell them:There in the soft gold is your god!

Once upon a time we believed in a sea-splitter, a bush-flame,
a harvest of water from cliff,
snowflakes of honey flowering in the fields.
The I Am spun out the novas like tops –
who is this housebound heap of mute metal?

The born-abroad boys have their hands up already,
ready to host handcuffs and the looped iron.
Their laughter is like all the bluebells that jubilate the meadows.
They are like three men who met death on a whim
and struck up a downright neighborly acquaintance with her.

“…unruffled, sure, by the laws of their faith not logic, they opened their wingssoftly and steppedover every dark thing.” (Mary Oliver, EGRETS)

My husband and I have both been ill this week, with our throats too scratchy and hoarse to even read The Fellowship of the Ring out loud to each other before bed, as has been our usual routine. So last night I picked up Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, which was given to me as a gift by a dear friend from Dr. Bob Fink’s Creative Writing workshop. And in one particular poem, I found words to accompany the current season of my life and the newest Great Secret I’ve discovered.

As is usually the case, it was right there in plain sight.

Over the past few years, I’ve experienced a lot of heartache and disappointment. I’ve seen the crumbling and the ruin of people, places, and things that I’ve loved with reckless abandon. And the reckless abandon part of me has been all but swallowed up.

I’ll be quite open with you. Last semester, I came through a massive crisis of faith. The years of disappointment and loss came to a head and I found myself unable to place any confidence in the goodness of God. A mentor met me for lunch at Jason’s Deli and I cried through most of our meeting, unconcerned about who might see.

But time passed and the throes of doubt and anger dissipated. Even though I wasn’t getting along with God, I was dead-set on holding on to him. Like Peter said —

—Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

His words became like the theme of my life. And I was sad that the fire had gone out, but I was not shocked. I had read so many warnings about this from the Aristocracy of the Kingdom of Heaven. Hudson Taylor, Amy Carmichael, George Mueller, C.S. Lewis, Oswald Chambers, Abraham, Moses – they all fought this darkness, this blank space. I knew it wasn’t new to me; there wasn’t room for self-pity.

I would just keep going. I would just keep doing the things. I would not worry about whether I felt anything. I would just do it.

But loving Jesus, it’s not a Nike thing. It’s not a thing like Shia LeBeouf yelling at the camera and pumping his arms like a gorilla (I know, why does that video exist?). It’s not like that.

That’s what I learned in Tijuana. Alex and I were part of a group that went down to Baja earlier this month. We built a church and a home (well, we hammered a few hundred nails, at least, and slung lime green paint on the boards, our construction skills being minimal). In the park a little boy sat down next to us while we ate our lunch one afternoon and he spoke to us in Spanish and we painstakingly constructed and fumbled through clumsy questions and answers for him. And mostly we just sat together, us and the little boy from a lonely village in the desert, not saying anything.

But what was most beautiful about the trip was all the stories people told and passed on. On the bus, on the street, in meetings after dinner and breakfast in the frigid breeze blowing off the ocean, people told their stories of staggering grace. Their stories of change, and transformation, and hope deferred but nevertheless arriving. Their stories of faith.

And I learned something: faith isn’t only an action word. It isn’t only about what we do. It is also a climate of the mind. It is a determination to believe, come what may, in the coming of the promise. It is a rejoicing. It is a feast. It is a banquet in honor of things that are not. And when we’re holding that banquet, there’s no need to feel foolish, for at the head of the table sits God — who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.

I have lived in too many places and I'm homesick for the Far Country. I like thunderstorms, painting, calligraphy, fairytales and noisy crowds of children, and I write about literature, the good life, and the World’s Great Lover. In my spare time, I create calligraphy and illustrations celebrating literary masterpieces. You can find my work in my Etsy shop or request a custom order.

Letters From The Sea Tower

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